It really is about time I started writing Advagato entries. I'm intending to keep this diary purely for my development braindumps and leave whinging about my life, job and health to my more anonymous kuro5hin blog.

I have been a GStreamer developer for over a year now - as if there isn't enough of us posting to this site already. Until recently I have been developing mainly plugins and libraries, but I now find myself as the primary contributer to the GStreamer Media Player. I'm not sure how it happend really - all I wanted to do was add Dynamic Parameter support to the volume slider and I ended up touching almost every line in the source tree.

My initial interest in GStreamer was similar to wingo's - to use it as a core framework for music composition and audio processing. Now it seems for the moment at least my focus is moving from media production to media consumption, and this is quite a change in mindset. Writing software for a small group of artists is very different to writing software for the masses and I am currently welcoming the challenge.

I have the following goals for the player:

be the best option for viewing video either locally or over a network

be an adequate option for playing any audio media

be as integrated as possible into the Gnome desktop

There is currently a bonobo control and a Nautilus view which both work. I imagine their development will drift in different directions since the view has a more specific focus. I was surprised how easy Bonobo was to develop in. It really does need some more documentation and the current docs needs updating for Gnome2 changes. I have just got i18n working but until the player moves to Gnome CVS there won't be a lot of translating going on.

I really enjoyed GUAD3C and I thought briefly about going to Boston but I knew I'd experience the sort of sleep deprivation and stress that thomasvs is currently going through. I haven't heard much feedback from his player workshop yesterday but I'd like to incorporate any useful ideas into the player. While I'm sure some interesting things will come out of the workshop, I would be wary of a large group of people trying to define what the best Gnome player would be. Design by committee usually produces suboptimal results so I think it would be best if the workshop results were summarised and taken by a small focused team to implement what makes sense.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.